New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

Open Innovation

November 14, 2014

At a recent TEDx, I encountered Zoe Weil (pronounced Zo While). She is a pioneer in what she calls “humane education” and “solutioning.” You can find more info on her Institute for Humane Education web site. She describes being a Humane Educator as somebody who teaches about the interconnected issues between human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection. She was introduced to this field in 1987 through a course taught to middle-school kids in Philadelphia.

Zoe’s teaching work reached a tipping point as a result of her TEDx talk in 2011 in Brunswick, Maine. She gave a talk entitled, “The World Becomes What You Teach,” in which she spoke about the “Star Trek vision” of a healthy planet, with peace and prosperity—a planetary population that lives in peaceful coexistence with the populations of its planetary neighbors. Star Trek stories are full of adventures in which people explore and learn; not conquer, she said. She contrasted that vision with the current world full of conflict, human and animal abuse, climate change, and unsustainable practices. And then she offered her solution:

“There’s one system we need to tweak a little bit and if we do that we can solve every problem in the world. That key system is schooling.… We provide every student with the knowledge, the tools, and the motivation to be conscientious choice-makers, and engaged change-makers for a restored, and healthy and humane world for all. Or, another way of putting it: I believe that we need to graduate a generation of solutionaries…there’s no doubt in my mind that they could solve every single problem that we face.”

~ Zoe Weil, TEDx Talk, 2011

Last week, Zoe talked about all the wonderful attention and momentum she has achieved since her TEDx talk in 2011:

“The problem was that there were only a handful of us who were teaching about the interconnected problems of human oppression, rampant consumerism, animal abuse, and environmental destruction… I had the solution to all the world's problems: address the system of education, students can be solutionaries.”

~ Zoe Weil, November 9, 2014

Zoe then went onto describe some of the many things she has accomplished in furthering this movement, including teaching many workshops to kids and teachers, starting a program for graduate students, and:

“Last year, we created the first solutionary school in the pre-K through 12th grade. The curriculum is open source and shareable throughout the world.”

I found myself thinking about the powerful conversations I had had the same week with two graduates of URDT schools—institutions that are located halfway around the world, in rural Uganda. One of the conversations was with Catherine Namwezi, an alumna of the URDT Girls School (K-13); the second, Godliver Businge, is an alumna of both the African Rural University and the URDT Vocational Institute. These young women embody the knowledge, talent, skill, and motivation that Zoe described. Their education was obtained on a campus five hours west of Kampala on dirt roads, in the midst of striking rural poverty. They are part of this new generation of change-makers that Zoe passionately yearns for.

For 25 years, the Uganda Rural Development and Training programme (URDT) has been teaching local women and men, children, and young adults not to solve complex problems, but to create the world they want to live in. URDT’s founder, Mwalimu Musheshe, would probably agree with much of what Zoe Weil teaches and practices, but he would emphasize a creative orientation, rather than a problem-solving orientation.

“URDT provides transformational education to create effective change agents and change-makers within an African development context. URDT applies theoretical learning, innovative instruction, and field practice, so that its graduates can create conditions for rural people to improve their lives, transform their communities, awaken inherent leadership, and increase their capacity for self- generating and sustainable change.

The curriculum promotes visionary leadership, systems thinking, and sustainable development as its core pillars. It aims to give students a life-transforming experience by directly using principles of the creative process in their lives, in families, and in whole communities to create their own desired circumstances."

There are actually three educational institutions on the URDT campus that share this common curriculum: a Girls School (ages 10-18), a Vocational Institute, and a University for women, African Rural University (ARU). Yesterday, ARU was mentioned on Melinda Gates’ blog, Better By Half, in a post by Harvard Professor Calestous Juma, who is a big fan of ARU’s education and the hope it provides for African women.

Is there a connection between human rights and animal rights in the URDT education as there is in the Humane Institute’s curriculum? Absolutely. There is an animal preserve on the URDT campus as well as a sustainable organic farm. Is there an appetite to teach 10 year olds how to envision a better world and to equip them with the tools they need to achieve that better world? Absolutely!

Educating Change Makers to Create a Sustainable Planet

If you’re interested in Zoe Weil’s message about the need to “tweak” the education system in order to “solve” all the problems in the world, let me introduce you to some of the graduates of URDT’s educational institutions. Meet this new generation of change makers—the ones who will create the sustainable world we all want to live in.

April 15, 2014

This month, Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers’ amazing global organization celebrates its 25th anniversary. I highly recommend that you take your kids or grandkids and make the pilgrimage to St. Louis for the FIRST world championships on April 23-26th, 2014. Or at least watch the action via video. I’ve been to two of these annual championship events and taken both grandkids and clients. It was much more memorable and inspirational than a trip to Disneyland.

Of course, kids are naturally creative and innovative. So what’s special about the FIRST program that participation in it transforms any child into a chief scientist or engineer able to lead teams of peers to tackle our most complex and daunting problems?

Here’s what kids (and their parents and the mentors who coach them) learn:

25 Years of Training Young InnovatorsYour Next Hires? FIRST Inspires Young People to Invent and Innovate in Team Coopertition™ By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 11, 2014

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April 11, 2014

For those of you in the Boston/New England area, you have an opportunity to experience firsthand what a FIRST challenge looks like and to experience its gracious professionalism first-hand.

The 2014 New England FIRST Robotics Competition Region Championship (Qualifying Championship) Boston is this weekend...April 11/12 – The opening ceremony is TODAY, Friday, April 11th, starting at 8:30 a.m. at the Boston University Agganis Arena. The final matches and the closing ceremony takes place tomorrow, Saturday, April 12th.

March 21, 2014

Many of the articles we write and many of the consulting, training, and mentoring projects we do involve improving customer experience and/or designing new and/or improved products, services, and business models. Like all consultants, we have a set of methods and tools we use. We call ours Customer Co-Design, and it includes a method for facilitating workshops including customers and cross-functional stakeholders who co-design new experiences and/or products and services together. We call this workshop Customer Scenario® Mapping. We use it within organizations to help internal employees build consensus about the ideal customer experience they want to deliver. When used in this way—Customer Scenario Mapping is most similar to the technique of Customer Journey Mapping. We also use this method to facilitate co-design workshops with end-customers (business and/or consumers), partners, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders. What’s fun and useful about this approach is that it’s “customers all the way down” – you start with the customers designing their ideal way to “do their jobs” and then all the supporting layers and business processes neatly align around the customers’ key moments of truth and success metrics.

This week, Ronni Marshak shares the stories of how our Customer Scenario Mapping technique has been co-designed with our clients and their customers for almost three decades now.

June 29, 2013

This week, DuckDuckGo launched its iPhone app, DuckDuckGo Search and Stories.
Now you can enjoy the same anonymous, non-trackable, non-invasive, clutter-free
search experience on your iPhone, Android, or Windows phone that many of
us now use as our default Web search engine.

DuckDuckGo’s
Private Search: Now Available for Mobile Phones

I’m not as impressed with the “stories” part of DuckDuckGo’s
offering. (The home page shows you the most popular news stories.) But I love
the search. It takes advantage of two capabilities I’ve come to value
using DuckDuckGo: instant answers and !bang searches tightly integrated into
my favorite sites.

January 22, 2013

On Friday, January 11th, 2013, the girlfriend of 26-year old Aaron Swartz discovered that he had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. The Internet and social media sphere was quickly flooded with expressions of grief and outrage.

Who Was Aaron Swartz?

Aaron Swartz was an amazing visionary and activist who created tools and movements to empower, inform, and mobilize people. He was involved in developing and contributing to many of the tools upon which information sharing on the Internet are based, including Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the XML content type for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) of the W3C, and Web.py (a lightweight Web framework developed in Python).

He built Infogami (a Wiki application framework built on Web.py), which he used to launch a business that he merged with Reddit, which was, in turn, sold to Conde Nast. He used that same framework to build the architecture for the Open Library, a project to create “one Web page for every book ever published,” which now houses 20 million book records and 1 million e-books. He was one of the major creators of and contributors to Archive.org. He collaborated with his mentor, Lawrence Lessig, in the creation of the framework for Creative Commons’ licensing.

September 27, 2012

Last
week, I immersed myself in the wonderful Business Innovation Factory
community by attending the BIF-8 conference in Providence, RI. I always
find great case studies to pursue at this event, so stay tuned! For my
overview “trip report,” I stepped back and squinted to discern the
patterns and common themes that I took away from this rich tapestry of
storytelling and conversations. A few things really pop out:

People
of all ages are building networks (physical & virtual) to make a
difference in their world. Despite the economic malaise (or because of
it) there’s an abundance of grass roots social movements at the local
community level and across the country tackling everything from building
playgrounds, to reducing gang violence, to improving the lives of
homeless children, to bringing peace of mind to the mentally ill.

New
forms of institutions are turning up to take the place of the ones that
no longer work—for diplomacy, for education, for healthcare, for
citizen-led government, for city-planning.

Customer-led,
customer-engaged, citizen-led movements and organizations are where
most of the action is. We’re moving beyond social networking to social
working.

We now
know enough about how to create customer-engaged business models and how
to support social movements that we’re entering a meta-model era. There
are now “platforms for participation” with online tools and structures
that can be used as a foundation and/or a model by business and social
entrepreneurs.

The
biggest boost to our economy will come from life sciences, as our next
generation of programmers creates new bio-fuels and new healthy pathways
and we tap the power of the human brain to overcome physical
disabilities.

To
increase our happiness quotient, we need to counter the seduction of our
ever-present electronic gadgets by focusing on the present moment,
indulging in physical face-time, and experiencing life as we do music.

July 17, 2010

I was
excited to hear about the advent of Google
App Inventor for Android—an environment that
makes it easy for non-programmers to create apps for their
mobile phones. I'm still waiting to get my hands on it since
it's being rolled out for educators and students only.

Since the mid-1970s I've been a fan of application development
tools that end-users can use to roll their own applications. I
have long contended that if you really want your application
environment to take off, you need to empower end-users
to invent and create their own applications. I learned this
from watching the evolution of early word processing systems
in the mid-70s. CPT was one of the first companies to make it
easy for users to automate processes by storing a complicated
series of keystrokes, recording these as macros, and then letting the
user abstract that recorded code into reusable chunks of logic
with if/then logic.

Wang Labs and Digital Equipment also
implemented similar capabilities in their word processing
systems. Power users—the smart people (mostly women) who
produced most of the documents for their companies at that
time—quickly developed lots of time-saving and ingenious
programs that both automated and transformed their work.

Google App Inventor uses a different approach—a set of graphical
building blocks, based on the evolution of the work of
Seymour Papert's Logo language at MIT. [Another evolution of
Papert's work led to the LEGO Mindstorms' NXT User Interface
by National Instruments for a child-friendly and
scientist-friendly version of LabView—a sophisticated parallel
programming environment designed for sensing and controlling
inputs and outputs—which I describe in this
chapter of Outside Innovation.]

Here's the KittyPurr video demo of App Inventor for Android:

I am bullish about the Android App Inventor—not because I think
that it will generate tens of thousands of killer apps that
will give the iPhone app ecosystem a run for their money, but
because I like the end-user empowerment that it unleashes.
What I wish is that someone would also create a "do what I do"
keystroke capture/macro creator for Android (and iPhone) apps
that you could then edit and refine using either this
building block approach and/or a simple scripting language, as
with the word processors of yore.

Here's a video from Google's visiting professors who apparently contributed to the genesis of App Inventor for Android with a bit more background on their thinking.

April 29, 2010

You may have noticed this article in the New York Times, A
Hip-Hop Contest to Promote a Brand. Trojan, the manufacturers of
the Magnum brand of condoms, has grown revenues and marketshare for the
Magnum brand, not through traditional advertisements, but through word
of mouth: mentions in Hip-Hop music lyrics by artists such as Ludacris,
Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Eminem. The NYT article doesn't make it clear
whether the Magnum product manager engaged in product placement
activities or simply fanned the flames. I suspect there may be some
mutual promotion underway. ("I'll mention your product, you tell the
world about my song.")

Now Magnum is building on the Hip-Hop momentum by launching a "Live
Large" marketing campaign in the form of a contest soliciting more hip
hop or R&B songs and lyrics from anyone, not just professional
musicians.

You can go to the contest site, MagnumLiveLarge.com,
download music tracks to use and/or use your own, and submit your own
songs and lyrics about "living large." Fans can vote on the submissions
and, of course, spread them around virally. The winner will receive a
$5,000 prize and a trip to a hip-hop festival in mid-June in Atlanta,
where they’ll be congratulated by Ludacris.